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Max Boot

Max Boot is a leading military historian and foreign policy analyst. The Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he is the author of critically acclaimed New York Times best seller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. His earlier books include War made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and a master's degree in history from Yale University (1992). He was born in Russia, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives in the New York area.

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Recent Commentary

The issue of “preemptive” war is more in the news now than at any time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The impetus, of course, is the rapid development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which will soon give Pyongyang the capability to hit any American city with a nuclear-tipped ICBM. President Trump has been threatening “fire and fury” in response, and warning that the United States is “locked and loaded” for war.

The former secretary of defense, Ash Carter, fervently hoped that technology would transform military operations in the near-future in ways favorable to the United States. He put billions of dollars behind what is called the “third offset strategy.”

The campaign against ISIS is making significant progress. The end is in sight for the Islamic State. But its demise will not necessarily produce a lasting victory over terrorism. Unless the U.S. takes the lead in stabilizing Iraq and Syria, the territory that ISIS loses may simply be taken by other extremist groups, both Shiite and Sunni. To prevent continued violence and instability, the U.S. should push to oust Bashar Assad in Syria and to recognize the rights of Sunnis in Iraq. Otherwise we may well see ISIS 2.0 emerging out of the ruins of the Islamic State.

From all that can be gleaned from the record of the past fourteen plus-years, the U.S. appears to be less vulnerable to another mass-casualty attack than it was on 9/11. There have been some thwarted attempts to carry out large-scale attacks since 2001—e.g., Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underwear bomber” tried to blow up an airplane en route to Detroit in 2009, an attack, which, if successful, would have killed 290 people.

One hundred years ago, on July 1, 1916, five French divisions and eleven British divisions attacked across no man’s land in an attempt to puncture the German lines in northern France. The infantry assault had been preceded by an intense bombardment lasting seven days and involving a thousand artillery pieces.

Britons might never have voted to leave the European Union had it not been for the refugee crisis that hit Europe as a result of the Syrian civil war. Even though Britain has accepted only some 5,000 Syrian refugees, German premier Angela Merkel agreed to take in 800,000, thus fueling fears across the continent of an influx of possible terrorists.

Last December, Donald Trump roiled the presidential race by calling for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”

The world is transfixed by Britain’s referendum Thursday over whether to stay in the European Union. Some of the most interested and anxious spectators of the “Brexit” debate are in the Baltic republics, where I recently spent a week meeting with political and military leaders as part of a delegation from the Jamestown Foundation.

On May 16, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France signed an agreement that had been negotiated by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot to divide up the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence after the end of the Great War and the destruction of the Ottoman Empire.

There are some individuals—Donald Trump is now the most prominent—who seem to believe that a “population-centric” counterinsurgency is a waste of time. They don’t see the point of trying to win over the inhabitants and they reject the idea that counterinsurgency is essentially a governance contest. They believe that the way to win is by killing a lot of people. Kill enough, and there won’t be any more insurgents to oppose you.

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